Ruth Lehmann is the Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Professor of Cell Biology, Chair of the Department of Cell Biology, and Director of the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine at the New York University School of Medicine. She is also an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Lehmann received her PhD from the University of Tübingen with Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard where she identified and studied genes that establish polarity along the longitudinal axis of the fly embryo. Following a post-doc at the MRC Laboratory in Cambridge UK, Lehmann moved to the USA where she was a faculty member at MIT and the Whitehead Institute. In 1996, Lehmann joined the Skirball Institute where her lab is working to molecularly dissect germ cell development in Drosophila.
Lehmann has been actively involved in the governance of several societies including the Society for Developmental Biology and the American Society for Cell Biology and she is on the editorial board of a number of journals. For her scientific and community contributions, she has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences (2005), American Academy of Arts and Science and the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO). In 2011, Lehmann was awarded the Conklin Medal of the Society for Developmental Biology and in 2018 the Keith Porter Award from the American Society for Cell Biology.
